The Time Traveler’s Girlfriend: Safety Not Guaranteed

American indies come in two basic flavors: earnest realism and offbeat comedy sprinkled with quirk. The Sundance hit Safety Not Guaranteed starts out as one of the latter—a small-town dreamer runs a classified ad seeking a partner in time travel—but mellows into something fresher and better: a genuinely funny, surprisingly heartfelt little love story.

Aubrey Plaza stars as Darius, a Seattle magazine intern so alienated that her default mode is sarcasm. Then she’s sent on a peculiar assignment. Along with lazybones reporter Jeff (The New Girl’s Jake Johnson) and a brainiac intern named Arnau (Karan Soni), Darius is sent to the deadbeat town of Ocean City, Washington, to find the person who placed the ad, befriend him, and turn him into a human interest story. Seems simple enough. But when they arrive, Darius discovers that Jake has actually come to town to score with an old girlfriend, Liz, nicely played by Jenica Bergere, and that the man who placed the ad, Kenneth (Mark Duplass), isn’t the freak she was expecting; though suspicious and maybe crazy, he’s also sensitive, even soulful. And because she’s also both strange and strangely romantic, she quickly can’t tell what she’s doing. Is she helping Kenneth with his plans so she can get the magazine story—or travel with him in his time machine?

While Safety Not Guaranteed unfolds with an amiable looseness—it juggles science-fiction, romance, and a shambly comedy—screenwriter Derek Connolly and director Colin Trevorrow tell their story with an unshowy precision rare in this era of slackerish artlessness. They’re sneaky good at moving between laughs—as when the bogus and cocksure Jake tries to tutor Arnau in the manly arts of lady-killing—and the gradual birth of feeling between the wrought-up Kenneth and the deadpan Darius, who learns that, when it comes to love, there are no guarantees of emotional safety. This is hardly an original idea, of course, and there’s more than a little Hollywood hokum in the “you’ve gotta believe” finale.

Still, I feel churlish being hard on such a sweet-natured film, especially one so nicely executed, be it Darius’s sly approach to winning the paranoid Kenneth’s trust or Jake’s puzzlement when he thinks he’s falling for a woman he only wanted to bed. Trevorrow has a nice touch with his performers, winning work of surprising warmth from Duplass, who has gone from being one of the most annoyingly self-satisfied actors on the planet to a plausible leading man—you can actually see why Darius finds him appealing. That said, the movie winds up being a showcase for Plaza, best known for playing April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation, who here offers a hilarious master class in flat-voiced derision and stony-eyed stares. Yet the movie’s virtue is that Darius eventually goes beyond such brittle detachment. Indeed, watching her move from self-protective dismissiveness to feelings more headlong, we realize that Plaza hasn’t merely landed a role worthy of her gifts—she’s nailed it.